Yahoo: phoenix or zombie?

Well earlier Microsoft and Yahoo started discussing a amalgamation that later fell apart, the venerable search engine seemed a little lost in its journeying to an uncertain future. As we look at the latest news surrounding Yahoo, we can ponder what kind of soul base revealed by the company; is it a capital of Arizona or a zombi? Will the deal with Google save it - and if not, what's next?

The fable of the capital of Arizona states that the bird, after having lived a long life, dies in a fire, only to rise from the ashes, young, energetic and reinvigorated, better and stronger than when it entered the fire. A zombi, of course of study, is a shamble undead animal, hardly more than the shell of the human it once was, everlastingly hunting for brains. The inquiry is, which one is Yahoo?

We know how Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer might reply that inquiry. When he and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang could not agree on a purchase price for Yahoo, Ballmer walked away from the deal. This inspired Carl Icahn, billionaire and militant holder of Yahoo stock, to go to war against the hunt engine in an effort to push his own slate of campaigner onto the company's board of directors - a slate that would pursue Icahn's docket to rekindle discussions in the hope that the software system giant could be persuaded to purchase Yahoo after all. Possibly he would agree with Ballmer's assessment that Yahoo isn't worth about as much as Yang and certain others seem to think.

So is Yahoo turn into a zombi, then? Sadly, recent events would seem to confirm this. But they don't tell the full story. Yahoo has a history and some real staying power; it is one of the few companies that went through the fire caused by the tech bubble bursting about seven or eight years ago, and came out the other end relatively intact. Let's look at the current state of the search engine, and see if we can sift out some hope from the ashes.